[Prot 6.0 Beta] - I wanna get better

Beta's up! Its time to get rolling again. Since we likely have months of beta with frequent changes ahead, this thread will be more analysis and commentary than comprehensive overview (which would require semi-constant rewrites anyway).

So lets get started. We will start with a broad fluffy statement of changes to the overall dynamics of tanking, then move onto what's staying the same, and then end with what's substantively changing. It will all be pretty brief.

How the world is changing

From a 10,000 foot view, three things are changing about tanking, Vengeance, Health Levels, and Gearing:

1) Vengeance has been renamed to Resolve and is completely redone

- Resolve does not interact with dps anymore, so Tanks taking damage no longer has any effect on our dps. Tank dps should now be far more stable and in theory is balanced to come in around 50-75% of what a DPS can do. Plus no incentive to stand in fire. No idea yet how they're doing on hitting this mark

- Resolve *does* impact tank self-healing and absorb abilities. The idea is that a tank in a Mythic raid requires far more survivability than a tank out questing, but doesn't really require any more dps. How Resolve works is complex and we will go into its details another time. For now, just remember that Resolve is based on damage taken in the last 10 seconds and scales up much faster than Vengeance used to.

2) Less emphasis on being at full health

- Yeah, I know, they said the same thing at the start of MoP, didn't they? Yes, they did, and to be fair they did actually make some marginal progress in that direction. Running around in beta, a basic impression is that while character damage has been scaled down significantly, character health was reduced by a smaller margin.

- Whether or not this design goal succeeds will have a lot of impact on how we view tank survivability (because it will put a lot more emphasis on damage reduction and reduce the importance of spike management), but whether it succeeds will be more a function of how they balance healers than what they do to us. So keep your eye on healer changes.

3) Gearing

- The primary stats on all pieces of armor (not including Rings, trinkets, necks, etc) will be flexible and adjust depending on the wearer's spec. So If you're Prot or Ret, your helm will automatically have STR, but if you chance spec to Holy that STR will instantly change to INT.

- Gear will be far more broadly useable, though each spec will have its own preferred secondary stats which is how we will decide on who gets what gear. During beta, expect a lot of theorycrafting work on determining the exact rank order of each secondary stat for each spec.

- Rings, Necks, etc will be the only source of Bonus Armor, which will be the only formal "tank" stat.

What stays the same

- Fortunately for us, at this stage of beta, most of what makes us Prot Paladins is roughly the same as it used to be. At various points of Alpha, some of these things were very different ( as an example we've had anywhere from 2 to 4 seals at different points with varying mechanics, but we're currently back at our original 3) but as of the start of beta we're remarkably close to where we are on live. I'll put up a quick list of the things that are the same:

- HoPo generation

- Rotation

- Defensive cooldowns

- Utility abilities (We still have all the same Hand spells)

- Seals

The list of things that are the same is actually pretty comprehensive. All of our rotational abilities still do basically the same stuff with the same cooldowns, so the vast majority of our play remains the same.

So, what's different?

1) Old Stats going away, Hit, Expertise, Dodge and Parry are all gone

- Hit and Exp will be set at default levels for everyone

- Dodge and Parry will be occasionally available via trinkets and other sources but mostly will not be stackable

2) New stats

- Bonus Armor - Extra armor on gear is back! And extra armor will also give bonus Attack Power

- Balancing aims to set Haste and Bonus Armor as our best secondary stats, and everything else (including Crit) to be slightly worse. Versatility will probably be the weakest of the lot because its broad applicability.

Seems like Seraphim could be trouble at high gearing levels but we'll wait and see how the balancing shakes out.

So this should be enough perspective to get us going, bearing in mind that a lot will likely change over the course of Beta. A lot of theorycrafting needs to be done, and I strongly encourage anyone interested in helping to post here with questions or ideas.

Additionally, the redoubtable Theck is, as always, organizing the charge on data collection to knock out the current state of ability coefficients here: http://maintankadin....php?f=6&t=33707 I strongly encourage anyone with access to Beta to pitch in with data.

For the record, the WoD branch of SimC is more or less fully up-to-date for prot and ret. However, I haven't been careful about keeping the T16 or T17 profiles up-to-date, and boss damage is more or less a complete guess now (and TMI bosses haven't been updated either). And I haven't done any messing around with the action priority list yet either (i.e. to try out tricks with Seraphim and Emp. Judgments). I'm going to continue focusing on the core internals of SimC until around the end of July, at which point things may have settled down enough that we can start drawing real conclusions.

Yeah, quite a bit has happened and I've been slacking all summer. There's probably a month or less to go until the pre-launch patches go live (6.0.2, I think?) so its time for me to get going soon as well.

Blinding light was removed and then re-added as a talent, so that should free up one slot relative to what you had. Avenging Wrath is no longer prot. Aside from that and what you mentioned above (Though I think we still have Hammer of Wrath), prot didn't lose a lot.

I've finally gotten started on writing the guide. So far, while there are a lot of changes to abilities, its mostly tweaks (GoAK now lasts 8 seconds instead of 12, the coefficients for ShoR are different, etc) and the abilities still do what you'd think they do, and they're still about as important relative to each other as they were.

The bulk of the substantive changes come down to stat changes. Hit and Exp are obviously now gone, and that has some implications, plus there are now tanking impacts from things like Crit and brand new stats like Multstrike and Versatility which have tanking implications. In some ways I feel like I'm back in BC where even things like AGIL and INT had measureable implications for tanking.